The Israel-Palestine "Peace Process" That Never
Produces Peace: Local Government Has a
Role to Play

Americans
who follow the news but don't know this issue thoroughly must be befuddled as
to why these endless "negotiations" never produce results in spite of
the relentless chatter about how the US and the two parties so badly want to
find a "two-state solution" to the conflict. Of course, there are the stock answers in the
US media: "terrorism," Hamas, and the Israelis' having "no
partner for peace," etc. But there are much better answers than these
and the experience of Minnesota Break the Bonds in trying to get the Minnesota State
Board of Investment (SBI) to divest its Israel bonds illustrates the nature of
the challenges faced by those who seek a
just and honest solution to this decades old dispute.

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The
thesis presented here is simply that the two powerful actors in this 3-way entanglement--the
US and Israel--simply do not want any agreement with Palestinians if it undermines
their real unstated goals in the region.
For the United States that means the maintenance of their ability to
project military power in the region in order to control crucial shipping lanes
and oil supplies. For its part, Israel
claims to be interested in peace, but only on its terms, which put colonizing land
and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians far and away above any other concern. The evidence is simple and clear: Since Israel's 1967 take-over of East
Jerusalem and the West Bank, the number of Jewish settlers has grown to over
half a million in these places where
Palestinians used to live and can no longer live. Israel can get away with this because they
get billions of dollars, weapons, and political cover from the US.

None of
this is to deny that acts of violence are sometimes directed against Israelis
or Jews outside of Israel as in the recent attacks in Paris. Such acts are to be condemned and I
unequivocally do so here. But we need to
make two points. First, thanks to
Israel's massive firepower financed and supplied by the US, Palestinians suffer
violence all out of proportion to what is suffered by Israelis. In the 2014 Gaza bombing and invasion, for example, more than 2100 Gazans died, of whom
1,462 civilians; 495 of
those were children and 253 women.
On the Israeli side 72 soldiers and 7 civilians died, typical
proportions in these conflicts.
(www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28439404). The purpose is clearly to demand submission
rather than establish a basis for negotiations.

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Second,
and more important, if the US-Israel is so interested in peaceful negotiations,
why do they constantly thwart any and every attempt by both Palestinians and
the world community to bring the Palestine issue before the United Nations or
International Criminal Court even by the usually obedient Palestinian Authority? It was
widely reported that both UN representative Samantha Power as well as Secretary
of State John Kerry, if not Barak Obama himself, lobbied nations on the
Security Council to abstain so that the embarrassment of a US veto could be
avoided. Indeed, the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz gives Power special credit for
having "crafted the president's defense of
controversial Israeli policies."
(click here) So much for US as honest broker. If Samantha Power had been representing the
US in the 1980s, she no doubt would have argued for "constructive
engagement" in South Africa.

Unfortunately,
but not surprisingly, it has been no easier to get Palestine issues addressed
in Minnesota than at the UN or in Washington, D.C. Since 2009 the Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign
(MNBBC) has been advocating for the divestment of the state's millions of dollars
in Israel bonds, unrestricted money which is used in occupied territories for a
whole range of illegal purposes like building Jewish-only settlements,
demolishing Palestinian homes, and construction of infrastructure to allow
passage to and from Israel proper for Jewish settlers only.

The
Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 49) prohibits all such activities. When Minnesota funds activities which violate
an international treaty or convention that has been ratified by Congress, under
the US Constitution this constitutes a violation of US law. Because the SBI knows that the money Israel
gets from selling its bonds is used for purposes that violate international law,
it is financially complicit in those violations.

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On
these grounds MNBBC brought a lawsuit against the SBI. As a recipient of a state pension, the author
was one of the plaintiffs. In spite of
the issues of international treaties and Geneva Conventions referred to above, the
state court and appeals court saw fit to dismiss the case on the grounds that,
among other reasons, the plaintiffs were merely in "a policy disagreement
with the discretionary decisions made by the Legislature and the
SBI." In other words, the courts,
much like Samantha Power at the UN, saw fit to sweep aside all the issues of
this long history and simply embrace the unjust power relations of the status
quo. It's not that the state hasn't or
can't do anything. The SBI has divested
from companies in Sudan and Iran based on laws passed in the State
Legislature. In 1985, acting on its own
authority, the SBI established its own divestment policies for companies doing
business in South Africa. Thus, both the
state and the US government can find reasons to do what they want to do and
reasons to avoid doing what they don't want to do.

Retired from the University of Wisconsin-Superior. Former director of international programs office and Superior English as a Second Language Institute. Ph.D., University of Minnesota. M.A. degrees in linguistics and East Asian Studies from the (more...)

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